ADOI Blog

SCAM IN THE HILLS, SCUM ON THE BEACH

Ham on 04 16, 2008

For the purists amongst us, neither seems right.

The eternal phenomenon of scams invading advertising shows reared its ugly head again at AdFest this year. While rumblings of ScamFest could be heard along the darkened alleys of Walking Street in Pattaya, it really is the fault of cheeky creative types who try to hoodwink organisers by getting their scam entries in.

This year’s event had jury members hitting the roof, saying they never saw so many scam ads in a festival of this scale before.

The bright side is that judges are getting wiser. The dark side: ad festivals suffer, because all it takes is one high-profile scam ad or campaign to demolish their credibility and years of hard work, overnight.

Actually, most ad festivals have had their black days. Even Cannes… remember Toranga Zoo? It had scored a Bronze Lion for Lowe Sydney but Taronga Zoo revealed the ad had been rejected because it portrayed animals in a manner contrary to the zoo’s philosophy. Taronga Zoo was not even a client of Lowe, the ad had never run, and obviously the client had not given permission for the entry. Lowe Lintas started an investigation that uncovered a pattern of fraud and ended with the firing of creative director Mark Shattner. The agency also returned a second Bronze Lion, for a TV spot for Artel Australia’s plastic containers, and identified a scam poster at the New York Festivals.

For a while after that, show organizers who got cheated unwittingly into awarding scam ads were nicknamed ‘Shattnered’!

Now read what my dear friend Sreekant Khandekar wrote on agencyfaqs.com about this year’s Goafest….

“Goafest has a truly splendid idea, which is to publicly display the shortlist of entries. As I went around the gallery, I blamed myself for being so out of touch with advertising: I hadn’t seen most of the work. I felt better when I saw that other visitors were unfamiliar with the entries as well. Just then a well-known executive of one of India’s largest print companies went by grinning and muttering, ‘Remember, you saw them for the first time here’. That’s when the full horror of scam advertising hit me!”

Don’t worry Sreekant, previous Goafest judge Trevor Beatty agrees with you.

Coming back to AdFest: is it time for ADOI’s scam police to patrol the hallowed confines of PEACH’s judging halls?

Now that we are on the subject I might as well tell you about the biggest scam ever to erupt in the hills. One that would have surely wiped out the years of hard work put in by AdFest Godfathers Vinit Surapongchai and Jimmy Lam, and their tireless team.

Some years back, I was accosted by AdFest’s Jimmy Lam, upon

my arrival in Pattaya, about a print campaign entry from BBDO Singapore for Fedex that had just won the Best of Best prize, and which ran in my magazine. Jimmy asked if the ad ran within the stipulated eligibility period to qualify. I told him I was unsure but would check on it. In the meantime, an excited Francis Wee the ECD at BBDO Singapore called me on the ‘great’ news about his victory and that he’d do a mockup of my magazine showing his ad appearing in it. Then problem was, he had doctored my December issue, which was the month the ad was supposed to have run to qualify. But his ad ran in the Jan issue.

Francis was hungry for fame and one minor glitch eluded his grip

on the Asia Pacific’s Best of Best accolade. And me, of course.

The choice was obvious: tell the truth and let Francis be crest-fallen, or hide the truth and let AdFest get destroyed. Besides any of my 8,000 readers could have easily opened my December issue and seen that the ad did not appear in time to make it as an entry.

And after all, hasn’t Francis Wee won Asia’s fist ever Cannes Gold Lion already?

But what happened after that is now history, discreetly tucked away in the dark annals of AdFest history. That year, there was no Best of Best winner and BBH Steve Elrick’s brilliant Levi’s campaign which was widely regarded as the fore-runner ended up not winning the top prize. Because the judges had disbanded and it was too late to do a revote.

Anyway, just to keep this subject in balance, here’s a story about an awards shows doing a scam on participants!

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,973271,00.html

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